Digital photography and digital videography generally consists of following elementary components: optics, image sensor and signal processing. The optical system focuses incoming light onto an electronic image sensor. The image sensor converts impinging light for causing measurable electrical effects. The measurable electrical effects are sampled by an analog-to-digital converter. The signal processing component reconstructs an image by converting and processing data acquired by the image sensor and converted to a digital representation into a viewable format. The reconstruction step typically includes the processing steps of demosaicing or debayering, converting the sensor data into a RGB format which can be displayed by a monitor. Subsequent processing steps may comprise gamma correction, chroma subsampling, denoising, and JPEG encoding. The resulting image is typically stored on a recording medium such as a flash memory, an optical disc, or a hard drive.
Over the years additional sensors besides the image sensor have been integrated into electronic devices and into cameras starting with an autofocus sensor (AF sensor). Such additional sensors (for example gyro sensor, accelerometer, GPS receiver, temperature sensor) are either directly used in the image processing step, or their data are passed along with the image data as meta data for allowing more functions on the user side such as location tracking by GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.
The quality of the stored image depends on quality of the individual components. Recently, a trend called ‘computational photography (CP)’ has introduced a new design paradigm according to which the core components (optics, sensor, signal processing) are co-designed for allowing a compensation of deficiencies of optics and sensors by computations.